Some of the greatest hacking stories ("The Cuckoo's Egg", "The Anatomy of the Twitter Hack", "Max Vision")
Hacker are the philosophs of modern times: They’re looking at things in a different way than everyone is used to do.
I'm going to present you the ones that I think are sophisticated in some way or have an interesting angle.
These are my favourites so far:
"The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll
It goes back to the early day's of the world wide web, before the Internet, when it was mostly used by military, universities and a few hardcore nerds here and there, and most of the systems connected to it were mainframe servers with dumb-terminals or lab machines. In a way that makes the story all the more formidable - there was no Youtube to use for tutorials, there weren't exploit pack toolkits or frameworks like Metasploit - everything was done manually and there was a true sense of art/creativity/investigation/learning-by-doing involved.
The second is a much briefer read but one of the best, most interesting pieces I've read in this field: regarding the Stuxnet Virus over at ArsTechnica. This is something you can read on the plain or break and it is extremely well written. The Stuxnet Virus was (and it is yet) one of the most revolutionary items of malware created - it was clever,stealth, sophisticated and rarified. We're not talking of some drive-by download or browser hijack - this was targeted (successfully) at manipulating hardware control systems running specialized systems like Siemens control software, and paved the way for future aimed attacks and successors like Flame and Duku and so on ...
Another short article titled "The Anatomy of the Twitter Hack" which documents a infiltration of multiple services by a hacker who is known as "Hacker Croll". Most of what was used here is among the oldest, yet most reliable tools in any hacker's (well, one could say "cracker's") handbook - the oldfashioned Social Engineering attack and exploitation of the predictability of human nature. The net result was complete access to not just one service account, but a plethora covering a range including - Twitter, Gmail, Google, Amazon, AT&T, GoDaddy, MobileMe, Hotmail, iTunes and Paypal. I recall the days when this originally happened and it was fascinating stuff back then, so I thought it was worthy of sharing here and giving you some incitements.
The last story of Max Butler a.k.a. 'Max Vision' a.k.a 'Iceman'. Similar in some way to Albert Gonzalez, he was involved in stolen credit card trading forums on a massive scale. His hacks included backdoors on pentagon and government systems, and ultimately he decided to turn against his own rivals and even some of his own co-hackers in crime by essentially hacking the hackers. He hacked the other carder forums, dumped and broke their databases and stole all of their stolen data (something like 5 TB worth of data amassed in the 2000's which is a huge amount), then wiped everything out taking everything for himself. Eventually he was sentenced to 13 years in prison.